I have two PC's and a series of Juniper EX-2200 switches connected to form a network.None of the devices are connected to any external network.If I do an ifconfig on the first PC (monitor) I see that that PC only has an ethernet address.It does not have an IP address.I want to use an IP address to use applications such as scp.

So I do the following.

sudo ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.7 netmask 255.255.255.0

Now if I do an ifconfig the PC shows the IP address of 192.168.1.7 as expected.However it does n't seem to retains the IP address.It seems to lose the IP address after some time.I never rebooted the PC.It is likely that I am receiving ARP traffic on this PC.Can that cause the PC to lose the IP address.If yes,How can I cause the PC to retain the IP address